Top Essays USB Drive

This USB drive contains 100 of the top This I Believe audio broadcasts of the last ten years, plus some favorites from Edward R. Murrow's radio series of the 1950s. It's perfect for personal or classroom use! Click here to learn more.

In life you will experience many different situations. Some you will absolutely enjoy and others you wish never to mention again. Maybe you didn’t like a certain situation because of the other people involved or maybe you didn’t like the idea of it. It’s okay to feel dislike, but when you replace dislike with hate, it changes the meaning completely. Hate takes dislike to a completely different level; a level of caring. This idea might sound really weird, but I believe that you have to care to hate.

I never thought about this myself until a conversation with my mom about my day at school. It was just like every other day after school. I’d walk in the front door, set my bag down and sigh. Sometimes the sigh is big and sometimes small, but no matter its size that was my mom’s cue. After my sigh she always asks, “How was school today?”

I usually answered with one of the three responses:

“It’s going,” “Ugh, it’s school,” or “It was really good!”

That day I didn’t give any of those responses. I just started going on about this girl at school and how much I hated her. I never knew I could talk that much and that’s sad coming from someone who never stops talking. I gave my mom all the details. The ones of how the girl was prettier then me, all the guys talked to her, and (the one that got me the most) my friends noticed her. After my little rant there was silence between my mom and I. Then Mom just came out and said, “Why do you care?”

Then it hit me. I hated this girl purely because I cared. I cared that she had things I didn’t. I cared that it made me jealous, and I cared that I couldn’t change the situation. In the end, I cared so much that I stopped calling it caring, and I started calling it hate. In that moment I realized that hate and caring are on the same level. My mom has taught me many lessons, but because of that conversation I will always believe that you have to care in order to hate.

Essay of the Week

When she was young, Lauren LeBlanc had grand dreams of living in New York and singing on Broadway. Instead, she became a mom and schoolteacher in suburbia. While it’s not the life she once imagined, LeBlanc now knows she wouldn’t have it any other way. Click here to read her essay.